Mad About You
Paul and Jamie Buchman, a documentary filmmaker and a PR specialist in a Greenwich Village apartment, bickered about nothing for seven seasons while NBC moved them around the week. Helen Hunt won four straight Emmys for it, and the dog, Murray, was twice voted TV's most popular.
Mad About You premiered on NBC on September 23, 1992, co-created by its star Paul Reiser, who played documentary filmmaker Paul Buchman opposite Helen Hunt as Jamie, a public-relations specialist. The couple were newlyweds in a Greenwich Village apartment, and the show mined the small stuff of marriage rather than big plots. Reiser wrote the theme, "Final Frontier," with Don Was and played piano on the recording; Andrew Gold sang the opening version, and Anita Baker later recorded a full-length take. Murray the dog was played by Maui, found in an animal shelter in Castaic, California, and twice voted the most popular dog on television by TV Guide readers.
NBC used the show as a utility player. Season one aired Wednesdays after Seinfeld and then on Saturdays; in 1993 it moved to Thursdays at 8 to open the first season of Must See TV, and it climbed to No. 11 for 1994–95. When Friends took over the Thursday lead-off, Mad About You went to Sundays, dipped, then recovered leading NBC's Tuesday block. The New York sitcoms kept bumping into one another: Lisa Kudrow's Ursula, the flaky waitress at Riff's, was written into Friends as Phoebe's twin sister, and on November 3, 1994, Jamie accidentally blacked out Manhattan and the outage carried over into that night's Friends episode. Hunt won the Lead Actress Emmy four years running, from 1996 through 1999, and picked up the Academy Award for As Good as It Gets in the middle of that streak.
The Buchmans had a daughter, Mabel, in season six — the name came from "Mothers Always Bring Extra Love" — and for the final season Reiser and Hunt were each paid $1 million an episode. Ratings fell hard that year as NBC shifted the show again to prop up a Monday comedy lineup, and it finished 85th. The finale, "The Final Frontier," aired May 24, 1999, directed by Hunt, and flashed forward through the next two decades of the Buchmans' lives, with Janeane Garofalo as the grown-up Mabel. Reiser's book about the whole business, Couplehood, famously starts on page 145 to give readers a false sense of accomplishment. A 2019 revival on Spectrum Originals brought the pair back as empty nesters and quietly ignored the finale's flash-forward.
Similar items
Friends
NBC's ten-season juggernaut turned Central Perk into a real place and gave six 20-something New Yorkers the kind of friendship every 90s kid wanted. Rachel's haircut, Monica's apartment, Ross and Rachel's will-they-won't-they, and that theme song — an inescapable cultural monument that redefined the sitcom.
Seinfeld
"A show about nothing" created by Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David became everything. NBC's quirky hit turned observational humor about minutiae—shirt buttons, parking spots, the mechanics of social obligation—into the decade's most quotable comedy.
Frasier
A radio psychiatrist, his even fussier brother, their blue-collar dad in a duct-taped recliner, and a dog with a staring problem. Frasier turned sherry, opera, and wounded pride into eleven seasons of the most decorated comedy on television — then Kelsey Grammer sang you out over tossed salads and scrambled eggs.
30 Rock
Tina Fey turned her years running the Saturday Night Live writers' room into a live-action cartoon about a sketch show nobody at the network cared about. Liz Lemon, Jack Donaghy, Tracy Jordan and Kenneth the page won three straight Outstanding Comedy Series Emmys while the ratings never caught up — and NBC kept it on anyway.